Rancher App Migration from ‘Legacy Apps / Catalog’ to ‘Apps & Marketplace’

Due to the problem pointed out here

I am in the process of finding a way of transforming a Legacy App into a new one.

Did a lot of research & the only little point I got from the Rancher team was a lazy pointer to Instruction: How To Migrate Longhorn Chart Installed In Old Rancher UI To The Chart In New Rancher UI | The Longhorn Knowledge Base

& that was it.

Based on that, I have a script, which basically does the same as with the Longhorn app, but you can choose any app, instead.

Problem is now, the official way does not work. There is this line in the original Longhorn script.

At that point of the script, there is no app of the resource type apps.project.cattle.io, yet. How can it be found in the first place then?
The whole script is based on this line yielding information, when in reality it does not yield any.

That said, I would appreciate more information in general on this topic. To me, who uses Rancher in a professional production environment, it seems like the whole topic of app migration has been kind of swept under the rug by the Rancher team as quickly & silently as possible. There is barely any discussion on this. Only this non-working Longhorn script base & one issue on Github, where someone from the Rancher team said, that one should use the Longhorn script as a base for converting Legacy Apps.

At least, I have still not found a single out-of-the-box solution to this problem created by Rancher’s design choices. No single Kubernetes object or Rancher button, which I can press once to automatically convert all Legacy Apps. Nothing. It’s treated, like it never happend & Legacy Apps are even to be deprecated in a future Rancher version. Really does not make much sense.

Having Legacy Apps in a new Rancher setup is a serious issue for usability & working with existing production setups deployed through an earlier version of Rancher.

A test from one of the clusters.

kubectl get --all-namespaces apps.project.cattle.io
error: the server doesn't have a resource type "apps"

It can only find new apps like this.

kubectl get --all-namespaces app

Obviously, we want to convert a Legacy App though, not a new one…

My current solution attempt involves manually building an App object, as provided by the corresponding Rancher CRD.

Right now, I am trying to find a way, to artificially associate Resources, like e.g. Deployments, with the manually applied App.

Hello Aktio,

Did you find a solution for this? After migration to rancher 2.6.11 we are struggeling with the same situation :frowning:

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Hi @Sebastian_Kiljan and @Akito

What happens to the apps installed from Rancher Manager / old Catalogs after upgrading post 2.6.3, are they still available? Is legacy UI completely gone?

We’re considering upgrading but it isn’t clear what will happen to the existing apps and how much work it is to convert them to the new workflow.

Hello @artm We are in 2.6.11 where you can enable legacy UI in rancher. Application installed from Rancher Manager should be visible only in legacy mode to move them to new view you need to perform several steps like adding annotations and labels on the resource etc. In our case catalog was not working after migration but quick fix was reeading them.

Thanks, @Sebastian_Kiljan